**The lightweight styling markup language of GitHub, Reddit, StackExchange, Notion, and so many others.**
Markdown is a lightweight styling language. It allows you to style your text without taking your hands off the keyboard. It encodes the basic styles into the text, but does so in a way that keeps the text very readable, unlike other markup languages (looking at you, Hypertext Markup Language).
It’s de facto standard is [[CommonMark]].
A list of places that support Markdown would be impossibly long - places that support it that I already have notes for include:
- [[Obsidian]]
- [[Notion]]
- [[Jupyter Notebook]]s
- [[VS Code]] has support for preview
- As of iOS & iPadOS26 - Apple's Notes App has some
# Examples from Memory
```markdown
# Heading 1
## Heading 2
### Heading 3 (... up to 6 I think)
Regular line of text.
New paragraph, separated by a blank
line from the text above.
---
Horizontal rule
*italic* and **bold**
* list
* of
* bullets
1. List
2. Of
3. Numbers
> Quote
[link to a page](http://www.google.com)
For GitHub, Obsidian, & Notion, at least:
- [ ] To do
- [x] Completed to do
```
[link with title tip](https://example.com "An Example website")
# Reference Style Links
I just learned these are a thing and always have been. Whoa.
[a test][one]. %%←- only works in preview mode%%
[one]: https://example.com "an example"
# Criticisms
There are [[Markdown Alternatives]] that try to address many of these.
## Too many ways to do a thing
Like [[YAML]], Markdown supports multiple variations on things like headings, horizontal rules, and even hyperlinks. This can cause inconsistency in [[Markdown Processers]].
## Too limited in its expressiveness
Markdown has no default mechanism to do a lot of things:
- make tables
- color text
- highlight text, strikethru, & underline
- callouts
- footnotes
- fenced code blocks
... leading to the need for [[Extended Markdown Syntax]]es, which again vary in support.
### Quotes
Why are quotes done with a `>` rather than a `|`?
Just feels like the wrong choice. Nearly ever quote render I've ever seen insert a bar-like line to indicate "hey this is a quote", and you don't use the bar character?
****
## Source
- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown)
- [Markdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown)
## Related
- [[Plain Text Durability]]
- [[Mermaid JS]]
- [[Extended Markdown Syntax]]
- [[CommonMark]]